Local Thunder Bay organizations feeling impact of global cuts to HIV funding – CBC

UNAIDS’s 2025 Global AIDS Update predicts major spikes in new HIV cases worldwide due to global funding cuts

Jul 21, 2025

Researchers and support workers who focus on HIV prevention and education in Thunder Bay are worried about the potential consequences here in Canada as cuts, particularly from the US, take hold.

A majority of the major cuts to funding have come from the US government severing its ties with UNAIDS in February. The move paused funding for the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS relief (PEPFAR), a program responsible for roughly seventy percent of financing for HIV research and support services worldwide since 2003.

Pauline Sameshima is a member of Lakehead University’s faculty of education, and a member of the international HIV Obstruction by Programmed Epigenetics (HOPE) Collaboratory, whose research focuses on finding a cure for HIV.

HOPE brings in researchers from around the world to develop a strategy of blocking HIV reactivation, while locking it in in a dormant state and making it permanently defective through gene editing therapies and techniques. The research program received a five-year, $26.5 million grant from the U.S. National Institutes of Health in 2021.

Read more: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/thunder-bay/hiv-thunder-bay-global-cuts-1.7585581